Enlarge ImageRequest to buy this photoPIVOT"I wanted to do a show that's much more a conversation with the audience because, oftentimes, I watch TV and feel like I'm watching someone who's preaching to me because they have all the answers." -- Meghan McCain

Meghan McCain — who likes to say, “I’ve worked in politics since I was in utero” — is either the
great blond hope of the Republican Party or its worst nightmare.

The 28-year-old daughter of Sen. John McCain is accustomed to being the odd woman out, but she
doesn’t think she’s alone — which explains why she is launching a talk-reality show tonight on the
cable network Pivot called
Raising McCain.

“I am a socially liberal Republican,” she told the Television Critics Association this summer in
Beverly Hills, Calif., “and, in many ways, I have been ostracized from my party. I have been
ostracized in the media as well. I am too conservative for MSNBC, and I am too liberal for Fox.

“Where am I going to go? I’m going to go to Pivot.”

McCain — the oldest of four children of the Arizona senator and his second wife, businesswoman
Cindy Hensley McCain — graduated from Columbia University in New York with a degree in art history
and landed internships at
Newsweek and
Saturday Night Live.

During her father’s unsuccessful run against Barack Obama, she blogged frequently from the
campaign trail. She became a contributing writer for the Daily Beast in 2009 and a contributor on
MSNBC two years later.

She has written two books on her own:
My Dad, John McCain and
Dirty, Sexy Politics.

In a phone interview this week, McCain said she didn’t want to do a traditional talk show —
largely because she thinks the format doesn’t resonate with her target audience.

“I wanted to do a talk show but filmed like a reality show,” she said, adding that having a
guest co-host every week has made it a little more complicated but provided a new element to the
format.

“I really wanted the guest hosts to take a little adventure, a little journey with me,” she
said. “It’s kind of like
21 Jump Street, where they get their assignment from headquarters.”

The first of the 10
Raising McCain episodes, for example, will focus on the issue of whether the lack of
privacy is ruining our lives. To explore the topic, McCain and journalist Michael Moynihan compete
to see who can dig up the most Internet dirt on the other.

McCain pretty much strikes out on him, but, not surprising for someone as resolutely outspoken
as she is, her life is an open Internet page for Moynihan.

“My dad watched (the first episode), and he’s like; ‘This is so important; I totally relate to
this; I worry that I’m tweeting too much, my geo-location.’ And for my dad, that can be really
dangerous if he accidentally geo-locates himself on Twitter.”

Although she thinks issues such as Internet privacy, marriage equality, immigration reform and
feminism are being discussed by younger Americans, she isn’t out to use
Raising McCain as a bully pulpit.

“I wanted to do a show that’s much more a conversation with the audience because, oftentimes, I
watch TV and I feel like I’m watching someone who’s preaching to me because they have all the
answers.”

Future episodes will focus on what it means to be an engaged citizen if you’re in your teens or
20s; bullying; what it means to be gay in contemporary America; spirituality for millennials; and “
Millennial Veterans,” with Meghan’s younger brother, Jimmy, as the co-host.